The public history movement in North America that was born amid the academic job crisis of the late 1970s aspired to a radical reformation of professional history’s audience from an inward focused conversation among professionals to one working with government and corporate institutions and in dialogue with the public. This essay focuses on the institutional evolution of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to illustrate the unexpected, but not entirely unpropitious outcome that flowed from the failure of the organization’s original goals. How that movement failed and what it succeeded in creating may hold useful lessons for the contemporary public humanities campaign. In the late twentieth century, the public history movement failed to bring about a major reorientation of professional and academic history. In the attempt, however, it created an off shot of public history as one of a number of new but distinctly separate fields of academic historical practice. Unexpectedly, public history became a new academic specialty alongside other new fields from that era: native American history, environmental history, and gender history.

This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer journal between 1994 and 2021, as well as other relevant archival sources. The research examines the underlying forces that led these law firm partners to abandon their high-status positions and pursue alternative career paths during these pivotal moments in Hong Kong’s history. The findings suggest that the career trajectories of these elite professionals are not solely based on individual choices but are also shaped by their social origins and the physical and social spaces that influence their careers over time. This study contributes original insights into the complex interplay between individual, spatial and temporal factors that drive career mobility among legal professionals.

This article raises the question of whether bioethics qualifies as a discipline. According to a standard definition of discipline as “a field of study following specific and well-established methodological rules” bioethics is not a specific discipline as there are no explicit “well-established methodological rules.” The article investigates whether the methodological rules can be implicit, and whether bioethics can follow specific methodological rules within subdisciplines or for specific tasks. As this does not appear to be the case, the article examines whether bioethics’ adherence to specific quality criteria (instead of methodological rules) or pursuing of a common goal can make it qualify as a discipline. Unfortunately, the result is negative. Then, the article scrutinizes whether referring to bioethics institutions and professional qualifications can ascertain bioethics as a discipline. However, this makes the definition of bioethics circular. The article ends by admitting that bioethics can qualify as a discipline according to broader definitions of discipline, for example, as an “area of knowledge, research and education.” However, this would reduce bioethics’ potential for demarcation and identity-building. Thus, to consolidate the discipline of bioethics and increase its impact, we should explicate and elaborate on its methodology.

Uncovering the motivations towards a profession may contribute to a better understanding of how the profession is chosen and will be pursued. However, the research on the attractiveness of the music teaching profession is rather limited and predominantly focused on identity development, thereby overlooking other aspects that may play a role. In pursuing a case study, my aim is to contribute to this field of research by investigating the views of pre-service music teachers enrolled at the University of Karlstad in Sweden. The results depict a unique motivational profile compared to their counterparts in other subjects. These differential aspects are threefold, indicating a high prevalence of ‘extrinsic motivations’ driving their choice of profession, that ‘altruistic reasons’ have lower significance as a motivating factor, and that there is a poor perceived relevance of these individuals’ future profession. In addition, this study provides evidence of the prevalence of ‘musician identities’ over ‘teaching identities’ and foresees the dependence between the participants’ motivation and their future students’ progression. Moreover, I hypothesise that career changes and Pygmalion effects are to be expected if intrinsic motivation towards the profession is not fostered or if this population’s motivation is linked to the progress of their students rather than the challenge of motivating them in the first place.

The context- and person-specific nature of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) in England and Wales means inherent indeterminacy characterises decision-making in the Court of Protection (CoP), not least regarding conflicting values and the weight that should be accorded to competing factors. This paper explores how legal professionals frame and influence the MCA's deliberative and adjudicative processes in the social space of the courtroom through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners specialising in mental capacity law and retired judges from the CoP and the Courts of Appeal with specific experience of adjudicating mental capacity disputes. The concept of the ‘human element’ offers important new insight into how legal professionals perform their roles and justify their activities in the conduct of legal proceedings. The ‘human element’ takes effect in two ways: first, it operates as an overarching normative prism that accounts for what good practice demands of legal professionals in mental capacity law; secondly, it explains how these professionals orientate these norms in the day-to-day conduct of their work. The ‘human element’ further presents challenges that demand practical negotiation in relation to countervailing normative commitments to objectivity and socio-institutional expectations around professional hierarchies, expertise, and evidential thresholds.

Meeting the complex demands of conservation requires a multi-skilled workforce operating in a sector that is respected and supported. Although professionalization of conservation is widely seen as desirable, there is no consistent understanding of what that entails. Here, we review whether and how eight elements of professionalization observed in other sectors are applicable to conservation: (1) a defined and respected occupation; (2) official recognition; (3) knowledge, learning, competences and standards; (4) paid employment; (5) codes of conduct and ethics; (6) individual commitment; (7) organizational capacity; and (8) professional associations. Despite significant achievements in many of these areas, overall progress is patchy, and conventional concepts of professionalization are not always a good fit for conservation. Reasons for this include the multidisciplinary nature of conservation work, the disproportionate influence of elite groups on the development and direction of the profession, and under-representation of field practitioners and of Indigenous peoples and local communities with professional-equivalent skills. We propose a more inclusive approach to professionalization that reflects the full range of practitioners in the sector and the need for increased recognition in countries and regions of high biodiversity. We offer a new definition that characterizes conservation professionals as practitioners who act as essential links between conservation action and conservation knowledge and policy, and provide seven recommendations for building a more effective, inclusive and representative profession.

The Latin American model of vocational education has been widely portrayed as a homegrown success story, particularly by scholars and stakeholders who are aware of the region’s skill deficits, wary of alien solutions, and suspicious of institutional transfers more generally. Is the Latin American model really homegrown? I use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to trace the model’s mores and methods not to the New World but to Central Europe and go on to identify three different transmission paths in the 20th century: imitation by Latin Americans of German origin, descent, and/or training in the run-up to World War II; propagation by West German attachés and advisors in an effort to rehabilitate their country’s image in the wake of the war; and adaptation by local employers and policymakers—who received additional support from Germany—at the turn of the last century. The results suggest that institutional importation is less a discrete event or outcome to be avoided than an ongoing process that, first, entails translation, adaptation, and at times obfuscation by importers as well as exporters; and, second, is facilitated by immigrants, their descendants, and diplomats in transnational contact zones.